Thursday nights class at Sweat FA had good numbers again and we had the bonus of having Gary Davies in attendance which is always a treat. It was pleasantly warm in the martial art room given that the rest of the gym is usually freezing during the day and the temperature outside was a chilly -2C.
Venue: Sweat FA
Instructor: Ian Rossiter. (SJJA)
Warm Up: Laps of the mat, including, ass kicks, knee ups, facing inward for 2 laps, facing out for 2 lap. Neck, Arm and Shoulder stretching. Push ups 10 x 4, Squats 10x 4, Crunches 10 x 3, and then some leg stretching.
For the first technique, Ian quickly ran us all through the Triangle from Guard we did last week. You've got the opponent in your guard, you get a tight grip on his sleeves, open your guard and put one foot on the opponents opposite hip (left for right, right for left). Then with the strong sleeve grip, push the guys arm that's not on the side with the foot on hip into his stomach whilst pulling the other arm up towards you. Now fire your other leg up in the air then down across his shoulders (you may need a hip shift and rotation of the your body out to the side to accomplish this) and lock your other leg over the first to form a figure four around the guys head and forward arm. I drilled these moves with the ever improving (and ever slimming) Rich Presley. As there were odd numbers we were also joined by Gary which was a treat. Gary always imparts a few of his additional little golden nuggets of Bjj knowledge on the people he's drilling with which help immensely towards tightening up the technique.
Quickly after that we went on to the first Triangle defence from last week. As the opponent is going for the triangle you have to lift your head up a bit so he can't get it lock properly and his leg forms into what Nathan calls a diamond. Also, ensure the arm that is through the triangle hole is braced against the opponents hips, using your other hand reached around the outside of his leg and pressing down on the through arm for additional strength on the brace. Making sure your head is back as far as it will go (even going as far as to roll eyes back to emphasize the upward head motion) and the hips are braced down, you can then come up onto your knees (the triangle will break here if the guys got little legs and you have big shoulders) and then further up to your feet. From here the hold should break easily. After a short drilling of this we moved on.
From there, Ian and Gary showed us a different escape from the triangle attempt. You start off the same as before so you have your head and back postured up and arms bracing the hips. From here you bring your leg that is on the same side as your trapped arm, around to press against the opponents side and push it in hard as you turn your head away in the opposite direction. The pressure here should be from your knee on his side and the tightness of it being wrapped around the upper leg pushing it inwards while your head kind of pushes the lower leg out. The legs should come open, but you have to be wary at this point because if you follow your instincts and start to pull out and away in the direction your head is facing at that point you set yourself up to be omoplata'd. Instead you can either turn back in and bring your outside arm back in so you're are back in the guys guard to start the passing attempts again, or you can keep pressure on the opponents bottom leg (the one not over your shoulder) with your free arm and bring your previously trapped arm out and around the outside of the guys leg, then pass using the smash method of leaning all your weight on his leg from your shoulder, pushing it to the side until you can slide right by. While we were drilling, Gary picked me up on the fact that I was trying to just throw the leg over for the pass which give the guy on the bottom valuable space to reclaim guard.
Ian moved us on from here to a fairly tasty sweep. Starting from the feet on hips, hands gripping opponents sleeves, escape your hips slightly to one side. From there, pass the foot on the side you escaped to, over the opponents arm then put the foot on to his ribs (so you kind of have his arm grapevined with your leg). Now, bring your other foot up and bring your leg horizontally across his torso, hooking on the outside ( at the same side your other leg is). From here your opponents natural instinct is to pass to the side where both your legs aren't. When he does this you can grab the material of his gi pants on the non passing side and pull it up kicking up and over with your legs to sweep the guy over. When you come up, the arm that you originally had trapped with your leg is in a dangerous bicep crush position. If you put your weight on that it will really hurt the opponent but this is an illegal move in Bjj competition and would get you instantly disqualified. You need to allow space for the guy to retract his arm whilst also making sure you've got enough pressure on his upper body to ensure he can't break position and recover guard.
We drilled this move for a while and whilst we were going through the motions Gary showed us how to switch this in to a "cheeky armbar". Same set up as before up until the opponent starts to pass. From there you bring the horizontal leg out and over his far side arm and past his face. With your other leg out on the under side of both his arms you can get a nifty armbar with both his arms in.
Gary then felt a little bit disco and showed us an inverted triangle from the feet on hips, sleeve control position. With this one you don't wrap the leg round the arm instead keeping it inside positioned vertically up against his chest/torso on the his opposing side. The other leg still goes horizontal across though and from this position you push away with your knees while pull in with the sleeve control. The opponent will try to react by pulling away at which point you bring the vertical leg out and up over the guys non opposite shoulder (your right leg goes over his right shoulder or left for left) and start putting downward pressure whilst keeping both your shoulders flat on the mat - I had problems with this cause I kept turning on my sides for this- and curling your leg around his back. From there you fire your other leg underneath and out behind you then wrap it round the top leg to make the inverted triangle. Very flash. Only got a couple of tries on this before we realised we'd left a tragically short amount of time for rolling.
Now the rolling was where my previously mentioned problem occurred. First I rolled with Rich who, as I said before, is an ever improving White Belt who has been training quite heavily lately (3 times a week, lucky bastard). I had a good roll with Rich, his guard game has improved massively and he tends to jump straight into guard rather than try to grapple from the knees. He seems to be favouring spider guard a lot lately and was very close to sweeping me with the high foot in elbow crook sweep (obviously not it's official name). Now I used to get a lot of subs on Rich but recently that has not been the case and this time I managed to pass his guard a couple of times to side but didn't even threaten a any kind of sub so his game is definitely improving no end.
I next rolled against Gary. Now Gary has been off for a couple of weeks due to a new tattoo but rather than come back rusty (that's not Gary's style), Gary beasted the shit out me. I had one of those rolls where nothing went right and I felt like a total amateur. I was falling into obvious traps and not even keeping my limbs in tight. Because of this, Gary managed to capitalise on a couple of rookie mistakes and catch me in two nice tight armbars. And Gary can finish an armbar well. My 50% armbar escape rule definitely doesn't apply with Gary.
After that roll I was busy fluffing my crestfallen pride while every other guy was picking another opponent. Because of this I lucked out and was left with rolling against Ian. Ian's been rolling with a renewed vigour recently and I definitely felt the brunt of it. As soon as we touched hands for the start he jumped straight into an aggressive guard and tried for several different sweeps. I managed to stop a couple and get a pass into half guard where he threatened a kimura. Whilst the kimura was on and I was stopping it with a very flimsy gi pant grip, I managed to pass to side control and then escaped the kimura attempt by passing into mount. I tried to threaten a few subs from here but Ian had absolutely non of it and I was quickly back into his half guard then guard. I don't remember what happened after that (heat of the moment and all that) but Ian ended up hitting me with yet another armbar (3 armbars in the night!!!) which I'm pretty sure wasn't straight off from his guard.
After time was called on that roll Ian was about to call time. Me and a few others were quick in asking for more and Ian gave in and said we could have one more roll. I went against long time training partner Marcus. Now it's worth me mentioning here that in all the times we've rolled, Marcus has never tapped me out. Not to take anything away from Marcus though as I outweigh him by about 2 and a half stone and have been training for about a year longer than him. Tonight though, as I said, wasn't my night. Ok, I managed to get Marcus early with a Kimura from side control but after the reset I pulled guard and Marcus managed to pass to half guard. I worked on one of the sweeps I've been practising lately, making use of the framing technique I spoke of in my last log to escape the hips to the side (at this point it's worth mentioning that the 30 second warning had gone off). From that position I pulled his basing arm in and bridged for the sweep, turning him over onto his back though Marcus, as usual, exhibited his speed off his back and quickly reclaimed guard (this is one the strongest parts of Marcus' game). Marcus quickly crossed gripped my collar and I made a very stupid mistake here. I settled myself to pull on one of Marcus' hands at my collar to relieve pressure knowing that there was only seconds left (stupid and poor training practice). Time was called and I can recall thinking "I survived that one" but unfortunately my body did not want to move and then my vision swam. I can remember rocking back and forth thinking "I'll stand up in a sec" and Marcus saying "Martin, are you all right?" and then I was back in the room.
I got up and laughed it off with Marcus saying that he nearly had me but after we'd closed out the class and were getting changed I thought to myself that at the end of the day, if time hadn't been called, I would've been unconscious. Marcus got me. I shouldn't take that away from him, I should help him celebrate the fact as a milestone in his Bjj progress. I went over to Marcus and told him outright that he basically choked me out. We laughed about it as we left the gym. I'm very glad Marcus is improving that much and hope to have many challenging sparring sessions with him in the future.
Walking away from that session though I felt a little hollow as I've been making a lot of rookie errors recently. My last two classes my sub ratio has been pretty poor and a lot of guys are training 2 or 3 + times a week and are getting noticeably better while I feel I'm starting to stagnate. To combat this I think I desperately need to find a way to get additional training in. I've been tossing about a few ideas and discussing some things with Marcus and hopefully we can maybe start getting some extra mat time in soon. Even if it's just drilling techniques we know or have seen in a book with a healthy dose of rolling. Just need to get this together. Need to improve my game. Don't like the bad days.
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By the way, hopefully next time I'm at Ian's class I'll have my Video Camera fully charged to coincide with the lesson (idiot) and can film some or all of the techniques so I can post the vids here and you won't need to interpret my descriptions so much. Can't wait for that.
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